TEDX – Peter van Manen: How can Formula 1 racing help … babies?

This TEDX talk from McLaren Electronics’s Peter van Manen describes how a Formula 1 car sends hundreds of millions of data points to its garage for real-time analysis and feedback and how they used this detailed data approach to monitor children at Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

So what we did is we took a data system which we run every two weeks of the year in Formula 1 and we installed it on the hospital computers at Birmingham Children’s Hospital. We streamed data from the bedside instruments in their pediatric intensive care so that we could both look at the data in real time and, more importantly, to store the data so that we could start to learn from it. And then, we applied an application on top which would allow us to tease out the patterns in the data in real time so we could see what was happening, so we could determine when things started to change.

Khan Academy’s Fitting a line to data video is useful for getting a conceptual understanding (with no math) of how to determine when data changes or regresses.